Looking like a bear ... yay ...

So, finally, Sunday at the con, proper. We got there for the 11:30 panel, the Trash Animals meet-and-greet. It's a broader focus than the Raccoons and Procyonids SIG that I ran would get and it's probably going to be a replacement for that, unless I find something to make the ringtailed community particularly excited. I won't complain about any meet-and-greets, although the advantage of a species SIG is that you can really talk about the wonders of a particular animal or set of animals. The Trash Animals gathering didn't choose to have a focus about what makes some of us ``trash animals'' --- which is, after all, hat humans have dropped cities right where animals live, and the animals have learned to thrive on that, at the cost of becoming something different from their more wild counterparts. Of course, not exploring that topic is a choice of the organizers, and of the attendees. But perhaps that's also why I run a less popular gathering.

It was still a chance to meet several raccoons, though, and bunnyhugger brought her Chitter puppet on the expectation that squirrels count as ``trash'' here. The woman who suited as a the astronaut bear came too; I'm not sure bears have quite the same standing as a rat (well-represented) or a raccoon, but you can't deny humans make a mess of bears' lives. Still glad we attended, and the event was fun, even with one pretty loud guy being all nerd humor all over the place.

After this I had a couple small missions. One was to go to Lost and Found to see if they had my misplaced vaccination booster card. They did; the Dorsai handing it back to me said, ``Go forth, and lose no more''. Apart from pinball competitions, I haven't. I also went to the con store, because I turned out to have missed the directions on how to get my convention swag. This was a T-shirt with the convention's 'Fur Imagination' Willy Wonka-esque logo and patterning on it, and a drinking glass, and also my voucher for a meal in hospitality. The meals weren't much or very good last year and this year they somehow got worse, in that there weren't any vegetarian options unless you got nachos-hold-the-meat. That elementary-school-pizza of last year was looking very slightly better. (We ended up not using the meal vouchers.) I also, forgetting my promise to be right back where I'd left bunnyhugger, took all this back to my car to stow, and took my dear sweet time getting back to her. I'm sorry about that.

The next panel to get to was Theme Park Junkies. Much like last year it was a lot of talk about amusement parks, the host having a much more favorable opinion of Six Flags parks than bunnyhugger has. This time --- unlike last year at Anthrohio --- there wasn't a particularly big pile of odd memorabilia, but there were plenty of ride videos taken with camera glasses. And there was more of people going around sharing stories about amusement park experiences they've had. The panel leader shared a story about being stopped on the lift hill of Millennium Force, at Cedar Point, late last season and I started to wonder whether it was possible he was on that ride when we went closing weekend and the roller coaster had that long stoppage. Probably just coincidence.

Along the way we got a couple rumors about Cedar Point and particularly Top Thrill Dragster or whatever it's to become that bunnyhugger already knew. The startling revelation was that a block of Iron Dragon's track had been removed but apparently that's not much hint of anything besides that the Top Thrill Dragster work is easier to do without having to maneuver around the neighboring coaster being quite so close. There are some nice, weird ideas about what might be done with the 400-foot-tall yet ever-troubled roller coaster; it's possible that we even heard the correct one there. Suppose everyone will know soon enough, and I'll hear about it sometime after that.

Trivia: Rutherford B Hayes's cat, Siam, an 1878 gift from the United States's consul in Bangkok, is said to be the first Siamese cat to reach the United States. Source: The Uncyclopedia: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted To Know, Gideon Haigh.

Currently Reading: Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections: A Practical Guide for Museums, Angela Kipp.